Maths concepts this week

This week we are working on two concepts, both of which build up from basic concepts already tackled.

The first concept is finding out Odd and Even numbers. We are calling the ‘Even’ numbers as the numbers which play the game of 2. We went back to when we counted in twos and remembered which numbers played this game. This helped us to pick up the Even numbers from a selection of numbers. WE also found out that EVEN numbers always finish with either one of these numbers: 0,2,4,6 or 8. The numbers which were left over are the Odd numbers.

The other concept is Adding up more than 2 figures. We looked at this concepts from two different angles. We started off with a figure, which we needed to split in 3 groups.

Example: 14, then split up in 4, 3 and 7, 5, 5 and 4 etc… and we kept exploring how many different groups of 3 make up 14. We managed this with the use of buttons. Then we had to draw flags on castles to represent the number in each group.

The second part was were we had three groups of different numbers which we needed to add.

Example: 3+2+8= We put the 3+2 on one rocket and the +8 in a second rocket. We first added the numbers on the first rocket, ie: 3+2=5, put the 5 in our brains and continued counting up the 8 fingers we had out. When the second number was much bigger than we had fingers, we put that in our brain and the answer from the first rocket on our hands. With this concept we went a bit further as we mixed up + and – in certain sums.

EX: 3-2+4= We managed to work this with the same method as we used for the addition. We put the first group in our rocket (3-2), the +4 was put in a second rocket. First we worked the take away sum, then we added 4 to the answer of that to get our final answer. Having a good base with simple addition and subtraction helped the children a lot with these concepts.